Seriously chocolatey cookies

My niece came to stay for the weekend and since the weather was shocking, what else were we going to do other than hit the kitchen to bake up a choclatey storm?

It took us a while to narrow our recipe choices down to chocolate cookies. We actually used a recipe for chocolate and sour cherry cookies, but we rejected the sour cherry element for two reasons: Natasha thought they sounded gross, and I didn't have any anyway!

Apparently the mixture tasted gorgeous even before baking - its a wonder that we had any left to bake!



We made 11 enormous cookies and had one each for pudding, accompanied by strawberry icecream.



Here's the cherry-less version of the recipe, but I do think the cherries would be good in them, just perhaps not for teenagers who don't like their chocolate diluted by fruit!

Chocolate Cookies

235g dark chocolate
150g plain flour
40g drinking chocolate
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
100g butter
240g soft brown sugar
2 eggs

Sieve the bicarbonate of soda, flour, salt and drinking chocolate.
Beat the butter and sugar together, then add the eggs one at a time, beating well as you add each one. Fold in the flour mixture in 3 stages, beating well after each addition.
Melt the chocolate and mix it into the cookie mixture.
Line baking trays with non stick baking parchment. Form balls of mixture (about a tablespon per cookie) and place them on the baking sheet. Put in the fridge to firm up for 1/2 hour.
Heat the oven to 165C.
Bake the cookies for 15-20 mins until crackled on top. Cool on the tray for 5 mins then on a wire rack until cold.



Yummmmmmmmmm. (But go easy on them - they're very very very chocolatey.)

If you want to add dried sour cherries then use about 85g and mix them in after the dark chocolate.

Bread and Jam

Strawberry honey butter.

Doesn't it sound lovely?

The idea for this came from a blog I read last week, although I did tweak the recipe a little to make it a bit less sweet. This is the blog which inspired me.



The butter is nice alternative to jam, and was easier and quicker to make too. You need really good in-season strawberries for the best results; don't bother with inferior under-ripe examples. I enjoyed my strawberry honey butter on a slice of olive bread (basically the same as ciabatta); homemade and fresh from the oven just a few hours before. Tasty.



The bread was a good method: marvellous with in-season asparagus and poached eggs for breakfast, and a life saver when the in-laws came round for sunday lunch with only 4 hours notice. Father-in-law (sort-of, Dan and I aren't actually married we've just been together for ages) declared it the best bread he's ever eaten. The bread recipe was from the Bourke Street Bakery book. Its turning out to have been a very good purchase.

My top tip from today's sunday lunch: steamed new potatoes are way nicer than boiled ones and don't take any longer.

Enjoy what's left of the weekend.

Three ways with chicken

This month we are feeling poor (buying all the bits for a new bathroom will do that to you), so we're eating thriftily. Chicken fillets were on special offer at the butcher's this week, so that's what we've had for three dinners in the last five days. I'm not keen on eating the same thing over-again on successive days, so here are three ways with chicken pieces.



1. Chicken with sumac, za'aatar and lemon
This recipe came from the Ottolenghi recipe book. I marinated the chicken pieces in a mix of middle eastern spices (cinnamon, allspice, sumac) and lemon, then baked it in the oven with an approximation of za'aatar (I used a mix of sesame seeds, dried thyme and sea salt) and lemon slices on top. The lemon went soft and gave a delicious tang to the dish. I served this with couscous and some toasted pinenuts. It was a lot like a tagine: Perhaps not one of the most unusual-tasting recipes in the Ottolanghi recipe book, but easy, filling and certainly a very pleasant dinner.

2. Chicken and bacon burgers
I used the recipe for chicken and bacon sausage rolls from the Bourke Street Bakery book for these burgers. Instead of encasing them in puff pastry I grilled them up and served them in pitta breads with salad, potatoes and fried apple wedges. 'Junk' food but certainly no junk in them. Two chicken fillets and 3 rashers of smokey bacon made 4 burgers, so it was quite a thrifty dinner. The only other ingredients were a few breadcrumbs, a quarter of an onion, and a few spring onions. These burgers weren't quite as fantastic as the pork and fennel sausage roll mix that I adapted into burgers a couple of weeks ago, but they were meaty whilst feeling light on the calorie load.

3. Chicken rolls stuffed with orange, anchovies and chicory
I have a cook book which I've had for years - since my teens I think. It is one that my Mum bought us all as a job-lot for stocking fillers around the time she was trying to encourage us all to cook and fend for ourselves. The book's by Josceline Dimbleby and is called The Nearly Vegetarian Cookbook. It truely is a treasure trove of achieveable, delicious dinners.


We had left-over oranges still sitting in the fruit bowl from making Dan's birthday cake last week, and flicking through the book I spotted this recipe, which had the advantage that it would use the last of my special-offer chicken, some of the oranges, and the recipe described it as a 'delightful' dish. I decided to put my scepticism to one side (orange and anchovies didn't seem like natural partners) and give it a try.
I should have had more faith - it was lovely!
None of the individual flavours dominated the dish, which was subtle but well flavoured, and delicious served with wild rice and baby corn-on-the-cob. Dan liked it so much he licked the plate. Bad manners, but a ringing endorsement!
A first for me on this dish - I'd never used chicory in cooking before.

Here's the recipe:
Chicken rolls stuffed with orange, anchovies and chicory
Serves 2

2 Chicken breast fillets, skin removed
3 anchovy fillets (in oil or salt - drained and/or rinsed), finely chopped
1-2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1cm ginger root, finely chopped
1 medium chicory
Juice and zest of half an orange
150ml milk
5g cornflour, mixed to a paste with a little water
Parsley
Salt (go easy - the anchovies are salty) and pepper

Preheat the oven to 180C.
Place the chicken pieces (one at a time) in a plastic sandwich bag and bash them flat with a rolling pin. You need to get them to a thickness of about 1/2cm-1cm. Very theraputic!
Mix together the chicory, garlic, orange, ginger, anchovies and orange zest. Spoon this over the flattened chicken fillets and roll them up to encase the chicory mixture. Secure with a cocktail stick if necessary. Place the chicken rolls in an ovenproof dish and pour the orange juice around them. Cover the dish with foil and bake in the oven for 40-45 minutes.
Once the chicken is cooked drain the liquid from the oven dish into a heavy based saucepan and keep the chicken warm while you make the sauce. Add the milk and cornflour paste to the cooking liquid from the chicken and bring it slowly to the boil, stirring all the time so that it doesn't catch. Once the sauce has thickened slightly add the parsley, pepper, and a small amount of salt.
Serve the chicken rolls with fried mushrooms (I loathe them so I left them off my plate), wild rice, lightly steamed baby corn, and spoon the sauce over the top.

Pizza!

I have finally achieved a decent pizza base. Would it be blasphemous to say 'Allelujah!', particularly on Easter Sunday?

Until now my pizza bases have been a bit too thick and doughy for my liking, and although tonight's wasn't quite as thin and crispy as I would like, it was a definite massive improvement on previous attempts. Oh yes, I'm developing an all consuming love of the Bourke Street Bakery methods, of which this was one. I'll have to make a pilgrimage to Sydney some day.

The Easter weekend seemed to call for junk food, so sunday night was pizza night. I made a pizza bianco (no tomato puree on the base) using the Bourke Street Bakery base method.The topping I chose was wild garlic pesto mixed with a little yoghurt to loosen it (I went out foraging on saturday as I had spotted loads of wild garlic in one of the patches of woodland near us), roast purple sprouting broccoli, finely chopped preserved lemons, and buffalo mozzarella.



Not exactly your traditional topping choices. And yummy with it.

Croissants and other pastry delights

Generally speaking I'm not a massive lover of pastries for breakfast. They're one of those things that I occasionally get lured into buying by the smell, but then the taste almost never lives up to that promise. I usually find them too greasy, too flakey, and they just don't have enough flavour.

Of course there are some notable exceptions to every rule - I love the much breadier varieties that they make at the Natural Bread Company (an Oxfordshire bakery with a shop in Woodstock) - they're always buttery but not greasy; flakey, but not so much that you get annoyed with the bits of pastry all over you. They have texture and chewability. This, for me, is definitely how pastries should be.

Well, having set my bar quite high, I decided it was time to have a go at making breakfast pastries myself. I have a recipe book from the Bourke Street Bakery in Sydney, Australia which gives brilliantly clear instructions on how to make croissants. Time to take the plunge.

So here goes...

The night before, I mixed up a small amount of yeast, flour, milk and sugar, kneeded it well, then left it in the fridge overnight. This is the croissant ferment.


Next day I mixed the dough, kneeded it well and put back in the fridge. The instructions said to leave it there for at least 2 hours; I left mine for about 3 hours.


Next, I weighed out a truely extraordinary amount of butter. I actually used 400g instead of the recipe's 500g, as I wanted to achieve pastries that were a bit less greasy than the norm. I bashed the butter into a square about 1cm thick - I placed the butter between 2 pieces of baking parchement and hit it with a rolling pin. Quite theraputic!


After this I rolled the dough out into a rectangle about the same width as the butter square and about twice the length. I placed the butter in the middle, then folded the dough over the top.


The next step was to roll the dough out into a long rectangle then fold it over; I folded in thirds - one third towards the middle, then the other side over the top of that. I then returned the dough to the fridge to rest for 20 minutes. This had to be repeated twice more, turning the dough through 90 degrees each time I rolled it out. The dough was rolled out 3 times in total.


After a final rest in the fridge I had a laminated dough:

This was now ready to form into pastries.

I had inadvertantly made a hundred-weight of dough, so I had enough to make about 12-15 croissants and also about the same number of bear claws.

Here are the croissants, formed, risen (I let them rise for about an hour and a half, but if its a cool day it may take a bit longer), and ready to go into the oven:


I was very proud that the croissants actually looked like croissants. Amazing!



For the bear claws I made about 150g of frangipane and put a teaspoon of it in the centre of each piece of dough along with a teaspoon of damson jelly then folded the dough over and sealed the edges. Any jam would work nicely but I thought the slight sharpness of damsons would complement the frangipane.

The bear claws looked pretty good as they came out of the oven.



The house smelt lovely for the rest of the day after making these. I was really hoping that their taste would live up to the smell! When I finally did the taste test the next morning (5 minutes in the oven at 180C crisped them up beautifully) they were just as I'd hoped; flakey but still with plenty of dough-texture. The croissants were lovely with some homemade strawberry and mint jam, and the bear claws were tastey just as they came; no extras needed.

Just as well we both liked the outcome as we have freezer full of pastries now! This isn't a recipe I would make often as it is time-consuming and very messy, but I definitely will attempt it again. Its nice to be able to have pastries made to my own preferences. The recipe quantities makes such a lot of pastries that I have several months worth now. I will have to try making the Pain au Raisins recipe next time - its my favourite kind of pastry.



Full marks to the Bourke Street Bakery instructions. Its shaping up to have been an excellent cook-book purchase.